The present invention relates to crop conveying arrangements including a wide pick-up combined with a rotary conveyor, and more specifically, relates to a way of ejecting foreign objects, such as stones, pieces of wood and the like from the rotary conveyors of such arrangements when the rotary conveyors are equipped with centering augers having crop lifters.
U.S. application Ser. No. 09/436,329 filed by Anstey et al. on Nov. 8, 1999 discloses a so-called wide pick-up for a large round baler. This pick-up is wider than the baling chamber and has a rotary tine reel equipped with spring tines that deliver crop to a rotary conveyor equipped with right- and left-hand co-axially mounted augers for narrowing the width of the picked up crop to the width of the baling chamber. The rotary conveyor includes a set of rigid tines located between the augers. In order to aid in the delivery of the crop, crop lifters are mounted between the flights of the auger spirals, each lifter having a first end fixed to the auger tubular core and curving radially outward from there to approximately the outer periphery of the auger spiral. Occasionally, a foreign object will be picked up with the crop. If the foreign object is picked up in a central area of the pick-up, little or no damage to the machine will occur due to the spacing of the tine elements which lets the object fall out or just feeds it on into the baling chamber to be rolled up with the crop. If, however, the foreign object enters either auger area, it may enter close to where the lifter joins the auger core tube and become wedged between the crop lifter and the auger pan, as the clearance between the lifter and pan decreases, causing damage.
According to the present invention, there is provided an improvement to the crop conveying arrangement disclosed in the above-identified patent application.
An object of the invention is to provide a wide pick-up in combination with a rotary conveyor including centering augers and associated crop lifters wherein the auger pan is specially designed for aiding in the ejection of stones engaged by the augers.
A more specific object of the invention is to provide a wide pick-up in combination with a rotary conveyor, as set forth in the immediately preceding object, wherein each auger is associated with an auger pan provided with a relief area in the vicinity of the rotating crop lifters so that foreign objectss may enter this relief area and be engaged and kicked out by the rotating crop lifters.
A still more specific object of the invention is to provide a wide pick-up and rotary conveyor, as defined in the immediately preceding object, wherein a forward part of each auger pan is formed by comb-like projections which serve to mount upper rear ends of U-shaped, crop strippers, in the form of relatively flat bands, for stripping crop from the tines of the pick-up, with the projections in the vicinity of the crop lifters being angled downwardly relative to the other projections so as to define a relief area.
These and other objects of the invention will become apparent from a reading of the ensuing description together with the appended drawings.